Ettore Majorana was maybe the most brilliant student of Enrico Fermi, and an outstanding physicist. He disappeared on March 25th 1938 at the age of 32 years, under mysterious circumstances and leaving no trace behind. The hypothesis that he committed suicide appears weak in the face of his withdrawing a conspicuous amount of money from his bank on the eve of his disappearance -he had a rational mind and such an action would have made little sense. Other hypotheses include an escape to Argentina, and even a collaboration with the third reich in Germany, where he had previously worked -Majorana had expressed anti-jew ideas in the past.

"Physicists seek simplicity in universal laws. Ecologists revel in complex interdependencies. Together, these two approaches may help solve the problems of global warming," wrote John Harte, professor at Berkeley, in Physics Today.

Republicans are more skeptical of global warming than Democrats yet about the same when it comes to acknowledging climate change.   And global warming skeptics conserve energy just as much as believers.

We've all seen Jurassic Park. An ancient petrified piece of tree sap (or amber) is found, containing a mosquito that has been sucking dinosaur blood before its demise. A little bit of this blood is gathered, and from it (Hocus Pocus) real dinosaur DNA is extracted. Not too much later, baby dinosaurs are being born, growing up to become man-eaters.

Science fiction, of course. Or not? 

E. Coli - Tracing The Source

In a few words, most reports are false, and the timidity of men acts as a multiplier of lies and untruths.
Clausewitz

The Pattern of Contextual Diminution

This pattern is a bit more involved,as it combines a number of other patterns. It also adds to theself-referential nature of PAC, as it describes the dynamics of anepistemological system, such as PAC.

MethodologicalStuff:

1. Introduction

2. Patterns

3. Patterns, Objectivity and Truth

There are often heated discussions about the Big Bang.  The Big Bang is well defined as the high density state that you get if you extrapolate the today observable cosmic Hubble expansion backward into the past.  This definition has been the same one all along; it did not change; it is still valid today.

 

What does this entail?

1) The Big Bang tells you nothing about the absolute size of the universe at any time! As far as the definition is concerned, it may have been infinite all along. The Big Bang is not where the universe has zero size.

Conventional Canadian wisdom suggests that all women should have a screening mammogram starting at age 50 (age 40 in most of the USA). The reason given is that mammograms detect cancers earlier, while it is still possible to treat them. Instead of dying of cancer, you can be a “survivor”. It’s a powerful message preying on the fears of women and their families. October is “breast cancer awareness” month and the promoters of screening mammography were out in full force when I got the telephone call to come in and get my first mammogram. I left their message on my machine to think about it.

Fellow Tubesat pioneer Wesley Faler of Fluid&Reason has calculated power curves we can expect for our orbiting picosatellites.  His summarized estimate is that 6-cell solar panel in a sun-synchronous polar orbit with perfect positioning can expect to produce 0.5 Watts.  This sets our ultimate power budget for the satellite, and helps us choose appropriate instrumentation and control schemes.

Think you can't live without caffeine?  Some bacteria can live on caffeine.  

Previous studies discovered caffeine-degrading bacteria, but new research one goes a step further and identifies four bacteria that can live on the compound.    One of them, known as Pseudomonas putida CBB5, was found in a flowerbed outside a University of Iowa research laboratory.   Now they have identified the gene sequence that enables the bacterium to break down the caffeine compound in nature.

The expansion of the universe should slow as time marches on, some even conjectured it would slow and then collapse again - that's what all that mass and its gravity in the universe should do.

But Hubble showed us distant supernovae in the 1990s and researchers realized the universe had actually been expanding slower in the past, not faster - and that was a pickle for current theory.   So researchers hypothesized Einstein's theory of gravity and a cosmological constant might account for it,  or some strange kind of energy-fluid filled space or Einstein's theory of gravity was wrong and a new one including some kind of field creates cosmic acceleration.    No one knew what it was, but they called this mystery Dark Energy.